ABSTRACT. One of the most baffling aspects of T. S. Eliot’s poetics is the way in which it revises structures and techniques of the past in order to obtain a paradoxical semantic synthesis made up of contradictions and ambiguities. The impersonal poetic self is continually torn between memory and desire, life and death, time and Time, love and Love, emotion and reason, abstraction and concreteness. Its two alternatives out of this semantic paralysis are either the amazing multiplication of voices and perspectives the earlier poems, or the more sober visions the later period. The relevance of Eliot’s poetry at present rests both in its still puzzling critical insights and in its endless ramification of meanings that are forever beyond. pp. 54-59

Keywords: tradition, memory, revision, ambiguity, meaning